Last week, I wrote about certain aspects of Verdi’s Un Ballo in maschera—its close-to-the-unities compactness and the northerliness of its tinta as distinct from that of other proximate Verdi operas. And I discussed a Berlin radio performance of 1938 starring the Danish tenor Helge Roswaenge, along with some of the other singers and conductors who might have given us performances of the work bringing that aspect of its aesthetic to the fore. These thoughts were occasioned by Ballo’s return to the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera, but time ran out before I could address that event. My assessment herewith.

The Met’s production is a revival. As my regular readers know, I try to give revivals good attention, since—for all our interest in new operas and new productions—it is upon them that the survival of a repertory company ultimately depends. This one was one introduced eleven years ago, conducted then by Fabio Luisi and directed by David Alden with a design team of Paul Steinberg (set), Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes), Adam Silverman (lights), and Maxine Braham (choreography). Since no Assistant Director is credited with the re-staging, I assume that D. Alden was present this year to guide the re-installment of his interpretation. His brother Christopher was more prominent than David on the New York scene some years back (early on, there was also fraternal co-direction), so D. Alden’s work was not familiar to me when this production was new except secondhand, via European-based commentary. That commentary, though, had led me to watch the video of his Munich Festival production of Tannhäuser, and then to give that more-than-cursory attention in Opera as Opera. ^(I) There, in a chapter on revisionist Regietheater as of the time of writing, I gave Alden credit for a more complex and courageous approach to Wagner than Robert Wilson’s with Lohengrin. “He faces the work,” I acknowledged, “and from a certain P.O.V., digs into it.” I also quoted bits of his philosophy of production, which he describes as emanating from his own inner emotional life. “I can’t really direct something until I feel that what I have to say personally I can say through this piece.” I coined a term, “auteurial subjectivity,” to describe this sort of thinking about theatrical direction, and asked, as I have many times before and since, “. . . why is it we are supposed to accept the director’s inner emotional life in place of the field defined by the work’s creator(s), not to mention the huge philosophical assumption  . . . that the world itself is but a projection of that life . . . ?”

Much as I disagreed with Alden’s Fichtean notion of his role as director (and much as I was pleased to learn that Christian Thielemann had refused to conduct a revival of this Tannhäuser, an almost unique stand on artistic principle by a contemporary conductor), I did not dismiss him out of hand. The confession of inner emotional life on display in Tannhäuser was misplaced and often off-putting, but it was not that of an immature fanboy—a fanboy not of opera, at that, but of the silly side of the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s. That’s what this Ballo is. I had seen it in its first season, and while my memory is often all too sharp at retaining an unwelcome production’s look and vibe, a long-dormant forgetfulness faculty had mercifully snapped to and expunged it utterly, save for the pretty image of Icarus’ flight on the forecurtain. I recalled fragments of the individual performances, but nothing of the staging. I had taken notes, though, and while in what follows I will add a few observations from the event of 10/24/23 [in the brackets], the freshest overall response will come from those of 11/27/12. They don’t make elegant writing, but they do convey the unvarnished reaction. Lightly edited for clarity of syntax and punctuation:

An event announcement for those in the New York area: on the afternoon and evening of Saturday, Dec. 2, I will be participating in a program sponsored by Teatro Nuovo to celebrate the 100th birthday of Maria Callas. It will include recollections by a few of us who saw her perform, some hands-on work with young singers to demonstrate the teaching of bel canto techniques, and much else, concluding with a concert of selections from operas Callas might have sung, but didn’t get around to. Program details and ticket info here.

And a preliminary note about today’s post: because of unanticipated tech troubles that must be addressed immediately, I have broken it into two parts, of which this is the first. The second, assessing the Met’s current revival itself, will follow next week. Thanks for your patience. 

Giuseppe Verdi’s mature, taut and compact, full-blooded, and in some ways uncharacteristic Un Ballo in maschera has made a furtive re-entrance into the Met’s repertory after an eleven-year absence. “Furtive” on three counts: first, the company is not promoting standard-repertory revivals. Following the practice of the last three seasons  and the one to come, this one opened with a contemporary American opera, Jake Heggie’s well-traveled Dead Man Walking, and the banner over the entrance to the house proclaimed that work’s title although it was alternating with performances of Verdi’s Nabucco and Requiem, plus the now-customary twice-weekly dark nights. As of my visit to Ballo (Oct. 24th), the banner read “The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” amid performances of Ballo and Bohème. Advertising policy has followed suit. Second, our lonely mainstream sentinel and bell-ringer, The New York Times, has fallen right into line. Until quite recently, the first seasonal performances of repertory operas occasioned dedicated reviews, not always prominent but reasonably attentive to performance and production, perhaps with a dollop of house history, hinting at a dim awareness of the reasons for the work’s admittance to the canon. But this fall, Zachary Wolfe’s thoughts on the Bohème and Ballo revivals have been conflated into a “Critic’s Notebook” item on the bottom quarter of the Arts section’s fifth page (see the NYT, 10/24/23). That seems to be the new SOP. And third, nothing in this production of Ballo, brought back after an eleven-year absence, bespoke serious, or even respectful, engagement with the opera, and little in the performance rose above the level of an expectable professionalism. The response of the audience, which was larger than those of some post-pandemic standard-rep performances but still significantly subpar, was low-key.

I am sure that to most of my readers, the story of the adaptation by Somma and Verdi of Scribe’s libretto for Auber’s Gustave III, ou le bal masqué; of the vexing disputes with managements and censors attendant on the new opera’s birth; of the change of setting from the historically grounded Stockholm in the year 1792 to colonial Boston (hence, necessarily twenty years or more earlier); and of the recent trend back towards the Swedish setting, is familiar at least in outline.^(I) So I won’t tread that worn-in pathway here. Still, some of the detours and way stations along the way may bear exploration. Though I can agree with Budden when he calls the opera’s central performance issue “the chiaroscuro of the score,” I can’t acquiesce in his dismissal of the setting as “a subsidiary problem . . . to which there is no obvious solution.” Certainly it’s true that Verdi assimilated all elements into a thoroughly Italian opera; that a hot performance can reduce the setting to a matter of comparatively minor importance; and that when Piave wrote to Verdi “So they want other people to judge whether your music, written for one libretto, can be adapted to another?”, he was referring to many changes proposed by the Papal Censor, not only that of the setting. But I think of Verdi, who wanted everything in his operas to serve a common dramatic purpose and who was keenly sensitive to the atmospheric color (the famous tinta) of each of them, working on his score, which, let’s keep in mind, he had completed before the censoring difficulties arose. And as he worked, as he envisioned each scene and character, the characters’ actions, desires, and emotions and exactly how, in what manner, the actions would be carried out and the desires and emotions expressed, he has to have had in his mind’s ear and eye two worlds that strongly marked what he wrote. One was French—not only the world of Scribe, of opéra comique and of Parisian flavors and conventions in general, but of the “real-life” court of Louis XIV, with which, for all his Enlightened outlook, Gustavus had been much taken and whose brilliance and sophistication trailed behind him to his lavish Stockholm court. The other was, obviously, Swedish, and that has to have included the feel of the scenario’s interior and exterior settings (the palace’s reception room and ballroom, Ulrica’s conjuration room, the bleak field of execution, the light and climate of that city of the North and the looks and ways of its people as Verdi imagined them. The French ingredient is acknowledged and studied for its influences on the score, while the Swedish is more often simply noted as a superficial aspect of the opera’s theatricality. But can we suppose that the music (and I think especially of that of the second act) would have been the same had the composer visualized a Spanish or Italian setting? I can’t. I think the North is in there, in a texture not quite that of any other Verdi opera. As Budden himself puts it, “Mediterranean sunlight is harmful to the plot.”

Fellow devotees: owing to work pressure, the post originally scheduled for today, Nov. 3, is re-scheduled for Mon., Nov. 6. I am writing about Verdi’s Un Ballo in maschera—in part about the current revival of this wonderful opera at the Met, and in part about the work’s unique nature and standing in the Verdi canon, and about a particular aspect of that (its northerly tint) as imagined in performance.

CLO